On the Mexican-American history textbook:

“One of the fundamental problems with the scholarship of the book is that you have non-historians writing a textbook for history,” said Trinidad Gonzales, a professor of history at South Texas College. “It’s really a polemic masquerading as a textbook, and it’s really trying to argue that Mexican-American culture, including Catholicism, is a fundamental threat to American democracy.”

On seventh-grade Texas history textbook, published in 1954:

“What you have set up here is this mythology. The women who helped these brave men were wives and mothers. They were connected to men through marriage and motherhood. They were not single women. They were not working women. They were not reformers,” [Dr. Nancy Baker Jones of the Ruth Winegarden Foundation for Texas Women’s History] said. “They were the women that were in their socially approved places to the exclusion of many other roles that women have played and contributions that women have made and lives that women have lived.”

This textbook was used by public school students across Texas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so it helped shape the perceptions and attitudes of people who today would likely be in their ‘60s.

…The textbook acknowledges that slavery at least played a role in the Civil War, but it also treats African-Americans as sub-humans, and again, only defines their history in terms of the convenience of slavery to Anglo, white property owners.

…”That was not just the reigning consensus in a middle school Texas history textbook. That was the reigning consensus in the 1950s in the northern and mid-western dominated college history professoriate. That’s the way college history was written about.” [Benjamin Johnson, an associate professor of history at Loyola University in Chicago]

[Walter Buenger, a professor in the history department at Texas A&M University] agrees. He says academics taught a whole generation to think of African-Americans as “children who were easily misled” after the end of slavery, which he says translates into modern day racism.

What A 1950s Texas Textbook Can Teach Us About Today’s Textbook Fight – Houston Public Media

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